Apparently these are the books most frequently listed as "Not Read" on librarything. Italicized is read but not finished. Bold is finished. Bold and asterisked is read for school.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Hmm. There's a lot of books there on my "intend to read but haven't quite gotten there yet" list. I'd better get cracking! Also more books then I expected that I started and didn't finish. Not finishing a book I begin is pretty darned rare for me. I suspect it's because many of these books I started to read because they were "great books" and I thought I should read them - and then discovered they didn't interest me in the slightest. The first few times that happened, I slogged through because they were "great books", and wound up having wasted my time reading a book I loathed (Madame Bovary is a classic example here). So since then, I'll give a book a solid try (at least three chapters) if it's on the great book list, but if I still can't get anywhere with it, I'll stop. Though there are some books that I petered out on that I do intend to come back to. Such as Beloved, where I suspect my ability to read outside my own experience simply wasn't well enough developed yet when I attempted it the first time.
5 comments:
On that list I really love The Poisonwood Bible and I'm very fond of The Life of Pi.
I have also started to read Lolita, but I just couldn't get myself to continue reading it, eventhough it is a Great Book. I started Ulysses but I just didn't understand what the heck was going on.
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You must make room in your life for "The Time Traveler's Wife"! I'm in the middle of it and it's wonderful. Many of your "not-finished" books are not finished in my world, either. In fact, it's gotten to the point where I may as well start them all over again! Too many books, so little time...
I guess it boggles my mind that people are allowed to run around without having read The Prince, merely for self defence from the trolls who have. I told Lene Anderson that Moby Dick changed everything I wrote afterward (I read it at 19) whether I wanted it to or not. I literally keep writing Moby Dick, I mean, if you look at anything I do, if you look at the last year just the theme of the last year of my blog, what do you get; effing Moby Dick and the "only one is left, floating upon the casket of his friend" - She said she should put it on her list to read and I said that she hadn't been twisted enough for it to make such an impact and the 80 pages on how PRECISELY to kill and skin a sperm whale could probably be missed.
Dracula! Dracula! I take great offense that is on the list, I mean, what, is NO ONE afraid of syphilis anymore (the thing is one big, "Sex is fun....but can send you to Bedlam or WORSE" pamphlet).
And Anna K.? I mean, reading this book can give you a life long use of withering sardony. Sigh. Have they compared this to Europe's List? Or is that a global internet list thing
Elizabeth, I've read enough excerpts of The Prince to have a pretty good idea of content, but have never sat down and read it the whole way through. I really should, though.
Moby Dick I petered out on about two chapters in (though I was 16 at the time, I should probably try again).
I gather from EBear, that this is a list of books ordered (or taken out) and then not read. So, basically, books people think they should read, but then don't.
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